engineering

United States National Agricultural Library

United States National Agricultural Library is a engineering topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand United States National Agricultural Library rather than just read about it. In short: The United States National Agricultural Library (NAL) is one of the world's largest agricultural research libraries, and serves as a national library of the United States and as the library of the United States Department of Agriculture. Located in Beltsville, Maryland, it is one of five national libraries of the United States (along with the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the National Transp…

Key takeaways

United States National Agricultural Library belongs to engineering; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect United States National Agricultural Library to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of United States National Agricultural Library from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

The United States National Agricultural Library (NAL) is one of the world's largest agricultural research libraries, and serves as a national library of the United States and as the library of the United States Department of Agriculture. Located in Beltsville, Maryland, it is one of five national libraries of the United States (along with the Library of Congress, the National Library of Medicine, the National Transportation Library, and the National Library of Education). It is also the coordinator for the Agriculture Network Information Center (AgNIC), a national network of state land-grant institutions and coordinator for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) field libraries. NAL was established on May 15, 1862, by the signing of the Organic Act by Abraham Lincoln. It served as a departmental library until 1962, when the Secretary of Agriculture officially designated it as the National Agricultural Library. The first librarian, appointed in 1867, was Aaron B. Grosh, one of the founders of the National Grange of the Order of Patrons of Husbandry.

History

NAL was established as the U.S. Department of Agriculture Library on May 15, 1862, by the signing of the Organic Act by Abraham Lincoln. In 1863, the library's collection comprised 1,000 volumes that had been transferred from the U.S. Patent Office's Agricultural Division. By 1889, the library's collection had increased to 20,000 volumes, and a librarian from Amherst College was hired to create a classification system for the library's collection. At this time, the library was located on the second floor of the Department of Agriculture's main building. In 1893, William Cutter was hired as Librarian of the Department, and he began a reorganization effort to modernize the library and improve its effectiveness. His primary achievement was consolidating the library's collection of 38,000 volumes into one central library; previously, more than half of the library's collection was held in divisional libraries across the United States. By 1900, the library's collection contained 68,000 volumes, and in 1915, the library was moved to a larger facility in the Bieber Office Building at 1358 B Street SW, Washington, DC. The library moved again in 1932 to facilities in the USDA's South Building on Independence Avenue. In 1934, the collection reached 250,000 volumes in size, and the library began participating in the Bibliofilm Service, which, along with the American Documentation Institute and the Science Service, supplied microfilm copies of articles to scientists. This was the first large-scale attempt by a library to provide copies of library materials to patrons rather than the original documents, and during its first year, over 300,000 copies were distributed. During World War II, the Department of Agriculture underwent reorganization to address wartime needs. The library, which had been decentralized since 1920, was consolidated into a central facility under the direction of Department Librarian Ralph R. Shaw. On May 23, 1962, the 100th anniversary of the library's establishment, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman officially designated the library as the National Agricultural Library, making it the third national library in the United States. In 1964, funds were appropriated by Congress to begin planning for a new library facility in Beltsville, Maryland, on the grounds of the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center. Construction on the new facility began in 1965, and it first opened in 1969. In 2000, Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman designated the building as the Abraham Lincoln Building.

Librarians of the Department of Agriculture Aaron B. Grosh (1867–1869) Stuart Eldridge (1869–1871) John B. Russell (1871–1877) Ernestine H. Stevens (1877–1893) William P. Cutter (1893–1901) Josephine Clark (1901–1907) Claribel Barnett (1907–1940) Ralph R. Shaw (1940–1954) Foster E. Mohrhardt (1954–1968) John Sherrod (1968–1973) Richard Farley (1973–1983) Joseph Howard (1983–1994) Pamela Q.J. Andre (1994–2002) Peter Young (2002–2008) Simon Y. Liu (2010–2014) Paul M. Wester Jr. (2015–2024)

Facilities The main library is housed in the Abraham Lincoln Building, a seventeen-story facility on the grounds of the Henry A. Wallace Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Beltsville, Maryland. NAL also used to operate a Washington, D.C., branch known as the DC Reference Center, which was located in the USDA's South Building.

Paul L. Byrne Agricultural Teaching and Research Center The Paul L. Byrne Agricultural Teaching and Research Center is located at California State University, Chico and is part of the 800-acre Paul L. Byrne Memorial University Farm.

Services

PubAg PubAg is a search engine that gives the public enhanced access to research published by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists, and also to agriculturally relevant citations from the scientific literature. At its launch on January 13, 2015, PubAg made over 40,000 publications by USDA scientists available, and provided access to an additional 300,000 citations.

Ag Data Commons Ag Data Commons is a repository and catalog for scientific datasets that are associated with publications by the USDA's agricultural research service and other institutions. The data included is funded by the USDA, either in whole or in part.

LCA Commons Hosted by the National Agricultural Library, the U.S. Life Cycle Assessment Commons (LCA Commons) is a collaboration among federal agencies, private industry, and academic researchers. The intention of LCA Commons is to aggregate and archive life cycle inventory data that represent US economic activities, making it freely available for re-use. It is geared for use in LCAs, supporting policy assessment, decision-making in technology implementation, and public disclosure of comparative product or technology assertions.

i5K Workspace @ NAL The i5k Workspace@NAL provides genome projects resulting from the i5k initiative with a space to display and share genome assemblies and gene models. In particular, the Workspace is geared towards research groups that do not have the resources to display the genome assembly and its features.

AGRICOLA

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.

Illustrations

United States National Agricultural Library: Construction of NAL's Abraham Lincoln Building — Construction of NAL's Abraham Lincoln Building

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with United States National Agricultural Library

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what United States National Agricultural Library claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In engineering, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to United States National Agricultural Library before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about United States National Agricultural Library ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of United States National Agricultural Library

In research: United States National Agricultural Library appears in engineering research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses United States National Agricultural Library in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: United States National Agricultural Library is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1862 establishments in Washington, D.C., 1969 establishments in Maryland, Agricultural organizations based in the United States, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for United States National Agricultural Library outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study United States National Agricultural Library in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what United States National Agricultural Library means in your own words.
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Frequently asked questions

What is United States National Agricultural Library in simple terms?

Why does United States National Agricultural Library matter?

Because it connects several engineering ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study United States National Agricultural Library?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on United States National Agricultural Library.